Nvidia GTX 980 Ti review: All the power of the Titan X for £550 ($650)

No, it's not cheap, but the 980 Ti is still an outstanding graphics card for the price.

After an endless stream of rumours, renders, and cheeky tweets, AMD is finally on the cusp of releasing a brand new flagship graphics card. We know that it'll feature a huge 1024-bit memory bus featuring AMD's innovative high bandwidth memory, and that it'll only have 4GB of it. We also know roughly what it'll look like, if the renders and tweets are to be believed. What we don't have is a release date, even if an official announcement at Computex or E3 is likely. The Radeon R9 390X, or whatever it ends up being called, is an important product for a company that desperately needs a win right now to claw back the market share it's lost to rival Nvidia—AMD's last flagship single-GPU launched back in October of 2013.

It's an exciting time for AMD, then. Typically enough, though, Nvdia's here to rain on AMD's parade. There's no shiny new tech or architecture change this time, but the brand new GTX 980 Ti is one of Nvidia's most aggressive graphics card launches to date—even more so than the exceptionally good value GTX 970, which got you most of the GTX 980's performance at nearly half the price.

The GTX 980 Ti is priced at £550 ($650/€740), features 6GB of GDDR5 memory matched to a 384-bit bus, and is based on the same full-fat GM200 Maxwell chip as the £870 ($1000) Titan X. The card will be available worldwide at all the usual retailers this week.

While a few CUDA cores and texture units are missing (Nvidia needed to do something with all those binned chips that didn't make cut, right?), the 980 Ti is, for all intents and purposes, a Titan X with less memory and a far more palatable price tag. Performance-wise, the 980 Ti is almost identical to the benchmark-topping Titan X. Yesterday, getting the best single-GPU performance on the market meant spending £870; today, it can be had for £550. Who says a bit of healthy competition is a bad thing, eh?

Yes, it's pretty much a Titan X

When the original Titan launched, it was a monster graphics card, but it didn't actually make use of the full (GK110) Kepler architecture it was based on. It wasn't until the release of the 780 Ti that we saw fully utilized GK110 chips. The Titan X and 980 Ti reverse that situation, with the 980 Ti featuring 2816 CUDA cores and 176 texture units versus the 3072 CUDA cores and 192 texture units of the Titan X.

That's not much of a cut considering how much cheaper the 980 Ti is, and those few missing CUDA cores make little difference to real-world performance.

Specs at a glance:

GTX Titan X

GTX 980 Ti

GTX 980

GTX 970

GTX 780 Ti

CUDA Cores

3072

2816

2048

1664

2880

Texture Units

192

176

128

104

240

ROPs

96

96

64

56

48

Core Clock

1000MHz

1000MHz

1126MHz

1050MHz

875MHz

Boost Clock

1050MHz

1050MHz

1216MHz

1178MHz

928MHz

Memory Bus Width

384-bit

384-bit

256-bit

256-bit

384-bit

Memory Speed

7GHz

7GHz

7GHz

7GHz

7GHz

Memory Bandwidth

336GB/s

336GB/s

224GB/s

196GB/s

336GB/sec

Memory Size

12GB GDDR5

6GB GDDR5

4GB GDDR5

4GB GDDR5

3GB GDDR5

TDP

250W

250W

165W

145W

250W

Stepping down to 6GB of memory does little to harm performance either. The Titan X's 12GB was always overkill, being more suited to the world of workstations and VFX production (where entire scenes must be stored in graphics memory), rather than the humble gaming desktop.

6GB of GDDR5 running at 7GHz attached to a 384-bit bus for 336GB/sec of memory bandwidth is more than enough for running games. That's certainly less than what you'll get with AMD's HBM, but Nvidia's memory-compression technology has worked wonders so far, resulting in a pixel fill rate that's miles ahead of the competition. As for whether 6GB is "enough," even the likes of GTA V and Shadow of Mordor—two games that are notoriously memory hungry—top out at 6GB, even with ultra HD texture packs and mods in tow.

Still, those wanting to squeeze the maximum amount of life out of their GPU—or are into the aforementioned rendering work—may want to stick with the Titan X for the time being. Even then, though, with the likes of the upcoming DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs set to support memory pooling across multiple graphics cards, perhaps the wiser investment is in two 980 Ti cards for a full-on 4K gaming rig at just a small premium over the cost of a single Titan X.

Enlarge/ Unlike with the Titan X, partners will be able to create custom cooling solutions like Zotac did with its Amp Extreme Core Edition GTX 970.

The rest of the 980 Ti specs are standard Nvidia fare. For the reference design at least, it features the same excellent all-metal cooler that launched with the original GTX Titan, complete with great cooling performance and a snazzy light-up GeForce logo for all those windowed case users out there. While blower-style coolers (those that force hot air outside the case) often get a bad rap for being noisy, Nvidia's reference cooler fares pretty well. While it was audible under load, it wasn't horribly distracting like many other blower cards we've used in the past. The blower design is also great for smaller cases, where the reduced space doesn't work so well venting hot air internally. You'll still have to make room for the 980 Ti's dual-slot design and 267mm length.

Power comes courtesy of one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe connector, with Nvidia recommending a minimum 600W PSU to handle the 980 Ti's 250W TDP. Nvidia says that still leaves plenty of headroom for overclocking, with the company claiming that some cards can be boosted as high as 1400MHz.

Port-wise, you get 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI 2.0, and 1x dual-link DVI. If the reference cooler or port loadout doesn't appeal, thankfully—unlike with the Titan X—Nvidia is allowing partners to create their own custom designs. Expect the likes of the excellent Asus Strix and MSI Twin Frozr coolers to make an appearance on the 980 Ti sooner rather than later.